ISIS in Indonesia

A steep decline in terrorist acts in Indonesia in 2014 should have been good news, especially because it underscored that police vigilance was high and extremist capacity was weak. But a third factor was also involved that was not such good news: more extremists were focused on getting to Syria and joining what they believed was a more important jihad than any they could wage at home. By late 2014, about 100 Indonesians, possibly more, were believed to have left to fight in Syria, some with their wives and children, and most to join the Islamic State.

Violent Extremists in Indonesia in 2014

By early 2014, Indonesia’s jihadist community was divided between those who supported violence inside Indonesia, with the police as the primary target, and those who believed that at least for the moment, violence at home was counterproductive. The former generally supported the Islamic State and its predecessor, the Islamic State in Greater Syria and Iraq (ISIS). The latter were more likely to support IS’s main rival in Syria, the al-Nusra Front, and its allies.

Prominent in the first group was Mujahidin Indonesia Timur (MIT), a group of some thirty armed men led by Santoso alias Abu Wardah in the hills outside Poso, Central Sulawesi. Santoso had run a series of military-style training camps in Poso beginning in 2011, and graduates and supporters are now scattered across Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi and Nusa Tenggara Barat (NTB). Despite being effectively under police siege during the year in his jungle camp, Santoso managed to smuggle out videos periodically to YouTube and radical websites. While neither he nor any other group managed any bombings in 2014, the few attacks on police during the year were all linked to MIT.¹ Santoso was the first Indonesian to publicly pledge loyalty to the Islamic State after its leader, Abubakar al-Baghdadi, announced the establishment of the new caliphate on 29 June 2014 (1 Ramadan).

The pro-violence group also included remnants of Mujahidin Indonesia Barat (MIB), many members of which had previous ties to an old Darul Islam network led by the now-imprisoned Abdullah Umar. It included some but not all members of Abu Bakar Ba’asyir’s organization, Jamaah Anshorul Tauhid (JAT), and many followers of the imprisoned cleric Aman Abdurrahman who had no specific organizational affiliation.

The group that argued most strenuously that the costs of jihad in Indonesia outweighed the benefits was Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), best known for its involvement in the 2002 Bali bombing. Since 2007, it had forbidden its members to engage in attacks on the grounds that there was no community support, and there was no justification for collateral Muslim deaths since Indonesia was under neither occupation nor attack. It was vilified as a result by other jihadists for having abandoned jihad but its early and strong support for anti-Assad Islamists in Syria reburnished its jihadi credentials and strengthened its recruitment potential. Through 2014 JI remained strongly anti-ISIS but it also remained the only jihadi group with the capacity for long-term strategic thinking and the question was what its ultimate goals were.

The Attraction of Syria

From the beginning, the conflict in Syria had exerted a strong pull for Indonesians, stronger than other conflicts such as in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere that were seen as part of the global jihad. The reasons were several. First, according to several prophetic traditions (hadith), the final battle at the end of time, called Malhamah al-Kubra, would take place in Sham (Greater Syria), when the Imam Mahdi would lead the forces of Islam to victory.² The appeal of taking part in that victory was high, especially as radical Indonesians were avid readers of books on Islamic eschatology, with one Jemaah Islamiyah-affiliated publisher in Solo, Central Java, issuing a whole series on events that would mark the end of the world. Many of the discussions on the Syrian conflict that took place around Indonesia from 2012 onwards were explicitly linked to these apocalyptic predictions.

Second, many Indonesians were moved by the humanitarian suffering of Sunni Muslims in Syria and...